The Doctor’s Dream
(1978, 16 mm, 23 min)
The Doctor’s Dream is not the title of the found film that was originally made for television. The editing
procedure was to count the number of shots and start the film off with the numerically middle shot and then, after that,
the shot that had preceded it, and the shot that had followed it, and to keep fanning further and further out until one
saw the first shot of the film followed by the last shot, which was of the painting the movie is based on. It’s called
“The Doctor” and is in the Tate Gallery, London. The painting itself has an interesting subliminal image appropriate to
what’s revealed by my re-editing process of the real, if subliminal, story of the film. A powerful sexual event was
hidden within the movie’s tv banality. Maybe without intention, but it's what was gripping in the movie if ever the
movie was gripping. In the painting, seen from a little distance, the doctor contemplates the sleeping girl with – you
don’t have to agree with this – his curled fist doubling as a penis entering his mouth (I’m sad to find myself so
constrained in my speech). Maybe this is the traditional method of smuggling forbidden information, hot stuff, through
customs from un-acknowledging mind to un-acknowledging mind. KEN JACOBS